


the stranger's lullaby

by citronlyrique, jonphaedrus



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Disabled Character, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, May/December Relationship, Past Character Death, Past Hanneman von Essar/Manuela Casagranda, Past Linhardt von Hevring/Caspar von Bergliez, Past Linhardt von Hevring/Edelgard von Hresvelg, Past Relationship(s), Post-Black Eagles Route (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Relationship, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-15
Updated: 2020-09-15
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:47:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26392144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/citronlyrique/pseuds/citronlyrique, https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonphaedrus/pseuds/jonphaedrus
Summary: “I’m back,” Linhardt said to himself.Hanneman’s cane was propped against the table next to where he sat.The War sat at the end of the table, an uninvited guest, and waited to speak with a studied, patient stillness that would outlast the end of the world.
Relationships: Linhardt von Hevring/Hanneman von Essar
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11
Collections: 2020 Ultra Rarepair Big Bang





	1. goodbye to me, myself

**Author's Note:**

> fic title and chapter titles from "l'etranger lullaby (the stranger's lullaby)" from the revolutionary girl utena soundtrack. the beautiful illustration/character design is from emi, who was a delight to work with for the URBB as my partner!! this couldnt exist without her ;v;

Linhardt stood alone in his new room and took in the silence. Despite being an empty chamber stone chamber—his furniture still not delivered, the only presence within it his own body and the suitcase he held—there was no echo, no yawning reminder of his size. It was just empty, and silent, and strangely small.

“I’m back,” Linhardt said to himself. The quiet met and swallowed the words up, and he slowly sat down the suitcase at his feet. He let out a slow breath and rubbed the back of his neck. “Not a very warm welcome.” The empty room said nothing; not that he’d expected it to. It was just an empty room, after all—there was nothing special about it.

The mere idea of unpacking what little he’d carried with him ahead of his furniture was so depressing—putting knickknacks on the floor, setting folded-up clothes onto windowsills—that Linhardt gave up before he ever even began.

He left, locked the door behind him, and went to go find something to eat.

Garreg Mach hadn’t really changed all that much from his memories. It was still the same: timeless, echoing flagstone halls, house banners hanging from windows and braziers, the clatter of armor and the dozing of guards and the constant tamp of footsteps. Garreg Mach teemed with life, filling up every room that it ran into, slamming doors and opening windows left and right.

The cafeteria was where it congregated and congealed—at least normally. During working hours.

At half-past eleven at night, there was nobody there.

He could fill those empty seats with memories, ghosts that took up chairs and tables. Dead friends. Dead enemies. Children, long-gone, on the other side of a war lost and a war won. Once upon a time they had sat together at these seats, broken bread and laughed over missing homework and fresh-caught fish.

Ghosts.

Linhardt walked through as quickly as he could, his uneven footsteps and the metallic click of his cane echoing on the walls, bouncing off of the tables. They sounded like the clack of silverware, the bubble of laughter, and if he listened too closely then he would surely hear voices, would feel hands tug at the hems of his robes. He could hear Edelgard now, pitching her voice softer than she had to, trying to hide her pain: “I could have told you that going back there wouldn’t help. What did you think you would find waiting for you, Linhardt?”

He grit his jaw, hurried his steps, as if the rapidly-approaching door to the kitchens was, instead, flying away from him, disappearing into the distance, the room elongating as he ran.

Linhardt grasped the knob, the same old brass as all the other door handles, a texture that his palm remembered as if it had been burned into his skin with a brand. He curled his fingers around it, tightened his grip, and pushed the door open, the hinges creaking as it swung open.

Hanneman looked up at him, and Linhardt froze, rooted to the spot, unable to move. His breath caught in his lungs, his whole body poised half-balanced on the ball of one foot.

He lifted his teacup, as if in a salute. “Good evening, Linhardt.”

He—

The last time Linhardt had seen Hanneman, it was during the war.

At the time, Linhardt had been unable to shake the feeling that they would never see one another again. And yet, here they were, all these years later. Face-to-face as if nothing had ever really changed, as if they were still all those years ago, except Hanneman’s hairline had receded another inch and a half and he had replaced his monocle with a thick, heavy pair of glasses. His mustache was thinner, wiry and white, the crows feet beside his eyes heavy. They gentled his face, made him look softer.

Manuela had returned to the Mittelfrank Opera Company two years before, and Linhardt had seen her now and again, their paths crossing whenever he had been attending a performance or she had shown up to some party. He hadn’t needed to talk to her to know that she had only come back because whatever she’d had with Hanneman had come to an end, for better or worse. Linhardt hadn’t wanted to ask, because there was always that niggling fear that maybe Hanneman had died.

But here he was, alive and well.

“Good evening, Professor.” It was so familiar. To be standing here, in this place, with this man. It was like he’d never left and the war had never happened.

It had, of course. Both of them had the scars to prove it.

“Come now, Linhardt.” Hanneman set down his cup, closed the book he was reading. He’d set up a small charcuterie board next to him, and he gestured to it. “You’re as much a Professor as I am now, there’s no need for such formalities. Care to join me?”

Linhardt had come here looking for food, after all—there was no reason to deny the invitation. He tucked his cane up under his arm and came over to sit down on the opposite side of the table from Hanneman, who slid the charcuterie board to him. Linhardt hesitated for a moment—he didn’t want to eat Hanneman’s dinner—but the silence, the expectation, was waiting.

He took some cheese and started to eat. Hanneman refilled his cup from the teapot steaming at the end of the table, and then uncapped a flask and tipped in something that smelled strongly of alcohol, a heady, dark whiskey of some kind. Linhardt watched and said nothing, just took more food, and enjoyed the strangely reassuring, comfortable silence between them.

“I must admit, Professor, I wasn’t...expecting to see you again. Here.”

Hanneman had not seemed surprised to see Linhardt. He did not seem surprised that Linhardt had been surprised to see him. Indeed, he just shrugged slightly, his narrow shoulders looking all the more slender for the bulk of his robes upon them. He’d lost weight. “I’m afraid I’m a man most suited to staying where I’ve grown roots. I’ve been here more than half my life. Why leave?” Hanneman cradled his cup, and his eyes looked far away. “A better question would be why you chose to came back.”

Linhardt did not answer it. Nor did he ask why Hanneman had stayed when Manuela had left. He cleaned the rest of the food off of the cutting board, and then ran his fingers over the head of his cane, the wood cool and reassuringly curved against his touch, the well-worn whorls of the grain as familiar to his hand as any other part of his body.

Hanneman’s cane was propped against the table next to where he sat.

The War sat at the end of the table, an uninvited guest, and waited to speak with a studied, patient stillness that would outlast the end of the world.

Three days wasn’t enough time to unpick the knots that had grown into the threads that bound Linhardt to Garreg Mach, but it was all that he had before he was supposed to start teaching, and most of it was spent locked in his rooms, buried in unpacking. That was easier than socializing—easier than wandering hallways that were familiar, standing in rooms full of ghosts, and thinking about being a child, who knew nothing and hoped for everything. He kept his own hours, prepared for his classes, and unpacked.

On the final night, a sharp knock on the door to his rooms revealed a gate guard with mail: a single letter, addressed to Linhardt in Edelgard’s distinctive, dagger-sharp cursive.

He took the letter, and sat with it in the center of his desk for a long time, long enough that the candle he’d lit burned out and Linhardt was forced to light another. When he opened it at last, it was short—unusually succinct from Edelgard, less than the full front of a page.

It said about what he expected it to. Linhardt folded it back up and put it once more into the envelope after he had read it, and then held it over the candle flame to burn into cinders. There was no point in responding. Edelgard was not awaiting his reply.

Everything he had to say to her had already been said.

Linhardt had accepted an offer to teach the history of Fódlan, both modern and ancient, at Garreg Mach. In theory, this was perfectly fine—history was the backbone of Linhardt’s belief system, the foundation of his life, an understanding of what came before which would underscore that which came after—but in practice, he got up in front of his first class to introduce himself, exhausted from waking up too early after not enough sleep, and—

The faces of two dozen children looked back at him. Two dozen strangers, today the youngest class, none of them a year older than thirteen. These children, this new generation that had been born after the War, coming to Garreg Mach, and they had never known anything about the world as it was, before. What was history to them but what it had once been to Linhardt?

Before you lived it history was a theoretical exercise, a hyperfixation to return to when you needed something to do with an afternoon.

There was a saying that Claude had told Linhardt one long-ago afternoon when they had been reading in the library: pity the king who lives in a time of battle, for he wishes for nothing but the ease of slavery in a time of peace.

At the time, he’d thought he understood it.


	2. an empty hello to this morning

Linhardt lifted up his cane and, in lieu of bruising his knuckles, rapped the handle on Hanneman’s door. It was louder, anyway, an echoing hollow  _thwack_ of wood on wood. As the sound faded, the door opened, revealing the older man.

Hanneman took one look at Linhardt and opened the door the rest of the way. “You look exhausted. Come in and sit down.”

He didn’t have to be told twice. Linhardt made it as far as the guest chair Hanneman had kept in his rooms since his time as a student—an old  fainting lounge, the legs bowing slightly as they had grown rickety with age, the leather of the cushions cracked and peeling and covered with a set of beautiful Almyran shawls, both as blankets and as ambiance. He collapsed into it, ungainly and with no energy or desire to pretend at a seeming of propriety, and then just lay there, sprawled sideways, staring at the ceiling.

“Good afternoon,” Hanneman said at last, still standing, leaned against the door. Linhardt slowly rolled his head over to look at the other man, too tired to do anything beyond stare balefully at him. Hanneman crossed his arms over his chest—it was strange to see him out of his professor’s robes, in only a high-collared shirt and breeches, fuzzy slippers on his feet. It was a form of intimacy, trust that Linhardt had longed for when he’d been a student. “I see your first day of teaching went well.”

Linhardt dropped his forearm to cover his eyes and groaned melodramatically. Hanneman laughed at him, and then the uneven scuff of his slippers followed his limping out of the room. “Tea, or coffee?”

“Whiskey,” Linhardt replied, not moving.

He fell asleep almost immediately now he wasn’t forcing himself to stay awake. Hanneman’s hand on his shoulder woke him. “I see your sleep troubles have gotten no better.”

Linhardt lowered his arm  and looked up at the other man. He was smiling  as he passed over a teacup,  still  steaming, that smelled strongly of warm alcohol. “Narcolepsy doesn’t get better,” he replied after a moment, taking the cup and cradling it. “I’ve just gotten  used to it.  Teaching this much in one day isn’t going to work, though. I’ll need to stagger my classes.” Hanneman sank down onto the overstuffed chair opposite him, holding his own teacup primly upon its saucer.

Linhardt had already put his saucer on the floor.

“Is that what’s driving you to drink this early in the afternoon? I’ve never known you to enjoy the taste of alcohol.”

“It’s been a long time since you knew me, Professor.”

He didn’t mean for it to come out like that:  as bitter as a weapon . Angry at a decade and more lost. Lonely. But it did, and the words hung in the air between them like Linhardt had just drawn a blade. He regretted it as soon as he shut his mouth, because those were the sorts of words you couldn’t take back. Once spoken, this is the kind of thing that would fester like an infected wound. 

Hanneman sat very still, stiff-backed, his jaw set and his eyes narrowed, one temple tensed. And then, after a long moment, he sighed—the tension went out of his body, his shoulders fell, and he settled gently back into his seat. He looked down into his own teacup with an unreadable expression, as if thinking about some great mystery of the universe. “Yes,” he murmured at last, “I suppose it has been. The world has gone and moved on without me.  You have grown and changed, and I am afraid I am much the same man as you once knew—just older, greyer, and more tired.”

Linhardt watched the steam waft up off of their tea. The silence wasn’t so sharp now, regret chased away by honesty. “I keep seeing their faces,” he admitted, his voice pitched low and quiet. “I can’t stop thinking about  the last time I was sitting here. When I was a student. The friends I had. The meals we used to share together in the cafeteria, when  they were alive.”

H anneman didn’t reply, similarly staring deep into his cup, looking for answers hidden inside the brew. He just listened, and that was exactly what Linhardt needed: silence and companionship.

There was a part of him that wanted to reach out and ask how Hanneman had handled it, when Fódlan had gone suddenly to war, and the students he had taught, the friends he had made, had suddenly turned back upon themselves, taking up arms against one another, spilling blood as if that could bring peace.

In practice, Linhardt knew he had no need to ask. He knew how Hanneman had handled it. After all, he had lived it with the other man. Watched the trust and hope in Hanneman’s eyes die.

“These children...” he said again at last, when his cup was empty and the warm burn of alcohol filled his stomach, the grip of old anguish was finally weakened. “They see the past as stories. I wish I still could.”

Hanneman had settled back in his overstuffed armchair, twisting his cup back and forth atop its saucer, the china whispering as it clinked together. “In my experience, that is how all parts of aging go. You become aware enough to look back on what you once knew as safety, but at that point, it’s too late to recreate security. Knowledge cannot be unlearned, for good or ill.

“All pains, even that one, dull with time.”

Linhardt thought of the secrets Edelgard had carried with her for her whole life. He thought of how many people had bled and died for the truth to win out. Was it worth it, that knowledge? It had been traded pound for pound for flesh, and the world might have been a little easier if they hadn’t insisted upon speaking up.

He had spent ten years wondering if they had done the right thing in the end. He wouldn’t know any better now than he had the last time he’d asked it of himself.

When it came time for Linhardt  to leave , after they had spoken of easier things, of teaching and assignments and the daily grind of Garreg Mach, had enough to drink that their shoulders had relaxed and their tensions had eased,  Hanneman stopped at the door, cane in hand, to  hold Linhardt back a moment longer

For a moment, it seemed like Hanneman was going to say something,  the words hesitating against the back of his tongue .  The moment passed; he thought better of it. Instead, he simply smiled. “Come by any time.”

Just as Hanneman had said, it got easier with time. With every day, then week, that Linhardt  taught, it got easier. Soon enough, he was completely at home, immersed once more in the daily life of Garreg Mach, a cast of characters as varied and colorful as the one from his childhood filling the halls and classrooms.

Routine sank in like water through limestone cracks, normalizing one day after another, until Linhardt had settled in so completely over two months that he was  taken by surprise when he woke up one morning and was unexpectedly informed at the morning faculty breakfast that the yearly Almyran visit would be the following week.  Gone were the days of houses turned against one another in mock-combat,  encouraging deep-seated animosity to stir the fires of Fódlan’s future wars. 

Now, with a united continent and peace built on the cairns of the dead, they had tactics and strategy drills against their nearest enemies: Almyra.

It had been Claude’s idea, in the beginning, seven years ago. That was the last time they had all seen each other; all the survivors, gathered together in Almyra for his wedding. He had pitched the concept to Edelgard as a way to foster peace and broker relationships between the two countries, to introduce students to age-mates from other places. It had grown from a handful of hand-picked students to several hundred from Garreg Mach and Almyra’s equivalent schools, alternating yearly on either side of Fódlan’s Throat.

This year,  this contest was to be  held at Garreg Mach.

The Almyran contingent arrived the following afternoon:  one full company of students ranging in age from fourteen to twenty, and then at least again as many support staff—cooks, hostlers, body servants, secretaries, and all the accouterments of any large, mobile group of  soldiers .

Linhardt, as the newest member of the faculty, was  elected to go out and meet them,  his only support staff nearly fifteen pages of instructions in Manuela’s neat handwriting tucked in his sleeve, left over from previous years. Soon enough the commander rode up,  swooping out of the sky on a long-necked green wyvern and banking sharply some twenty paces from where Linhardt stood, the gust of wind sending his robes flapping about his legs and tossing his hair in his face.

Shielding his eyest, Linhardt lowered his hand from his face just in time to be swept into an unexpected, crushing hug. Whoever it was laughed in his ears, loud and raucous. “Linhardt! Of all the people to see!”

“Let,” he started, struggling and wiggling, “Me _go—_ “ one final squeeze, and he was released, darting back like a distressed cat kissed one too many times.

Claude  ( no,  _Khalid_ )  von Riegan stood before him, hands on his hips, head thrown back, laughing. Linhardt had seen him last five years before, at his wedding, and the years since had treated him well.  The only grey in his hair was winging back from his temples, the rest of his full beard still a dashing dark brown. He’d grown fat since the war, his face full and glowing with health, and the weight had filed out his barrel chest. His hugs felt like being crushed against a particularly dense, jovial stone.  The corners of his eyes were ringed by years of laugh lines.

Glowing in Almyran gold and  copper, he lit up like a second, smaller, earth-bound sun.  Even when they had been young, Khalid had been  _magnetic_ :  now, grown into his charisma,  Linhardt found it difficult to tear his eyes away. It hadn’t been so long ago that Linhardt had nearly left the Black Eagles for the Golden Deer, and even after a decade, he still felt lit-up around Khalid in a way that he had never glowed for Edelgard. 

It really typified their differences. Khalid’s light was all blown outward; Edelgard’s focused within.

“Khalid,” Linhardt finally managed at last, when he was able to clear his throat. “I mean. Your Maje—“

“No, no, none of that.” Khalid took him warmly by the shoulder, smiled at Linhardt and then had the audacity to _wink._ “Don’t ruin my fun. Khalid is a _very_ common Almyran name, I’ll have you know.”

“Khalid,” Linhardt repeated, more exasperated this time. “What are you doing here.”

“What does it look like?” Khalid laughed, head thrown back. The sunlight caught the highlights in his dark hair, making it glow around his face. “I’m leading this year’s Almyran company for the grand melee.” The sheer joy he radiated was infectious, the excitement of a man freed from his usual constraints, and Linhardt found he did not have the heart to _really_ rain on the other man’s parade.

The war had taken so much from all of them: friendships, lovers, family. But for those of them that had survived it, even across lines, they were all that much closer.

That night, Linhardt joined Khalid and Ferdinand, who had come up from Enbarr for the tournament, drinking up on the Monastery rooftop. The moon was a waning crescent, the light pale but crisp, and the stones still retained the day’s warmth, the night air chill making it all the more welcome.

You could take the men out of their youth, but with a bit of mulled wine, the latent youth in the man was apt to raise its head: while Linhardt leaned back against the masonry, fighting off drowsiness, Khalid tossed sweetened popcorn and Ferdinand tried to catch it with just his mouth.

In the darkness, inebriated, neither one of them exactly had stellar aim.

“How’s old Hanneman getting on without Manuela to argue with?” Ferdinand asked, a piece of popcorn bouncing off of his left eyebrow. “I was surprised neither of them withered away and died as soon as she left.” The next one that Khalid threw missed Ferdinand entirely, bounced off of a parapet, and fell, lost.

He just tossed another one.

Linhardt watched them, two grown men trying and failing at ridiculous dares like students, and thought for a time before he answered. “He seems lonely, so I’ve been spending time with him.”

Without stopping what he was doing, or even looking over, Khalid said: “Are you still in love with him?”

Linhardt flushed, coloring surely up to his hairline by how much his face felt like it was burning, and took a big sip of his mulled wine to hide his expression. “ _Love_ is a little strong,” he managed,  almost steady. “ But I suppose so.”

Ten years had changed plenty about Fódlan, about Garreg Mach—about Linhardt. But it hadn’t changed his once-upon-a-time one-sided hero-worship crush on his brilliant professor. He had admitted it to Khalid when they had all been students, one late evening when they’d both been hiding in the stables. That tiny little crush, that he had known then was meaningless, hormones and respect.

And, of course, he’d had Caspar. And Edelgard. And those were much, much more than starry-eyed obsession.

But now, Linhardt didn’t have Edelgard, their bridges not so much burned as decayed, rope and wood eaten through by weathering and insects. Hanneman didn’t have Manuela,  the differences which had once brought them together finally, inevitably, driving them apart. 

That crush had grown, tempered, cooled, into something more. Something that Linhardt was not about to call _love_ , but was far more than simple hero worship.

“Have you told him?” Ferdinand was eating some popcorn as he said it, words cut off and mangled between chews. “You should tell him. I think he likes you.”

Linhardt ignored him. Khalid tossed the next popcorn by lifting his leg and throwing it underneath his knee. Ferdinand caught it turned around backwards.

They really ought to get down before they hurt themselves. Linhardt stared down into his glass, downed the rest of it, and called over, “Khalid, do you think you can toss two at a time?”


	3. looking to the east, looking to the south

The morning of the grand melee dawned bright and early, sunlight cracking through the shutters on Linhardt’s east-facing bedroom window. Even beneath the covers, curled into the tightest possible ball, barely conscious, he could already tell that it was a beautiful day outside. The kind of day you only got once a year, where the weather was just barely fall-crisp, a stiff breeze in the shade that kept the sun bearable, smelling of warm grass and with big, fat, cotton-puffy clouds in the sky.

It had to be.

He was too fucking hungover for it  _not_ to be.

At breakfast in the overcrowded cafeteria, there were no empty seats for his brain to fill with missing, half-remembered friends from another lifetime: between the Garreg Mach student body, parents and dignitaries from around the rest of Fódlan, and the entire visiting Almyran force there wasn’t even enough floor space to spit. Instead, he was able to fill seats with  _living_ friends. Ferdinand sat across from him, similarly hungover and unattractive in the way that only the deeply hungover can be, almost put together but just quite not put together enough to pass for anything other than exactly what he was. Khalid sat next to him, a solid, warm, and  _annoyingly_ chipper.  The bastard was  completely sober, as if he hadn’t had half a bottle of Almyran  Badeh the night before and then proceeded to attempt to teach Linhardt and Ferdinand how to do a one-handed handstand and kicked himself in the nose hard enough to bloody it. 

When Linhardt failed to finish his breakfast, picking over  the fruit and half-cold fried potatoes, he hesitated.

On a normal morning, he would have taken his plate and tossed the remainder when his conversation with Hanneman had petered out.

Today, he had his friends here.

Linhardt slid the plate toward Ferdinand and Khalid, and within moments they’d wiped it clean, bickering with each other  like they were fifteen years younger. 

Afterward, Khalid swept off with a jovial bow, looking handsome in his gold brocade tunic and leather archer’s armguard, mounted his wyvern, and  flew off to the Almyran side of the mustering line. Once more, they were divided over the lines of battle, but this wasn’t the kind where you fought to the death.

By midmorning it was  growing to be a hot day,  Linhardt’s medic’s tent humid despite the shade. What little breeze there was cut off at the walls, and sweat was dripping down the back of his neck beneath his hair even before lunch. The melee was to start officially after the noon bell rung,  and in the silence in the minutes before the starting horn, Linhardt just sat on one of the cots and stared at his hands.

“Why am I here?” He asked, staring at his shaking hands, so pale that he could see the veins beneath his skin. “Why did I come back?” It was quiet. Part of his return had been to fill Manuela’s role as the head of the infirmary, and he had already treated his fair share of injuries—weapons were not forgiving toys. A blade, even a blunted one, could break bones.

B ut there was a difference between the sprained ankles and broken wrists of the training grounds and a child, bleeding from an arrow in the shoulder, shot in battle. Friendly or not, blades could kill. Bows could kill. Magic could kill.

That was why he had left.  Edelgard had offered him  an out, and Linhardt had taken it. He’d run away, buried his head in his books, and pretended the world hadn’t kept turning. He’d spent a decade inhabiting his past, even as everyone had moved on. 

Linhardt still remembered the haunted, hollow look to Khalid’s eyes from his surrender at Derdriu ten years before. How he had kept reaching up to touch his face where Hilda’s blood had spattered when Ferdinand had ridden her down. 

Last night, Khalid had drunk and played with Ferdinand like a brother. As if Ferdinand hadn’t ridden Hilda down like a boar on a hunt. When had his wounds healed? When had his raw heart once more scabbed over?

Edelgard had let Linhardt escape for so long that he had forgotten what being  _present_ meant, and that  _present_ was filled with the past. When he was with others, it dulled that pain, but alone in the silence but for the distant ringing of steel and the cries of battle, it was the War all over again. It was sitting in the healer’s tents when he got so jumpy from the front lines that he threw up with anxiety, pricked himself while giving stitches. 

He should never have run away and hid.

(He should never have come back out.)

T he injured came in trickles rather than droves.  A fighter here, a bloodied nose from a fist. A myrmidon there, strained tendons that left her limping and whining. An Almyran archer, who had been taken from her horse by a lucky javelin, a broken leg and a bruised shoulder remarkably little to write home about. One of the Faerghan squires, too young to yet join the battle properly, who had gotten heat-sick his first time in armor. 

Ferdinand showed up at some point, his wrist sprained, and then went out again as soon as Linhardt had seen it better.

There were  others who came and went, judges and soldiers, students and teachers. The afternoon wore on in dust and sweat, Linhardt’s throat dry when he forgot to drink, his back aching and his temples pounding with exhaustion. 

“Professor Linhardt!”

Linhardt turned to see one of the gatekeepers, and leaning heavy on her shoulder was—

Hanneman.

His face was ghastly pale, his cane clutched in his free hand. His eyes were unnaturally bright, sunken and bruised, and he was panting. If the gatekeeper hadn’t been holding him up, he probably wouldn’t have been able to stand—the entire right leg of his pants was slicked flat with blood, his foot dangling, unnatural.

Linhardt moved without thinking, practically tripping over his feet. He didn’t even realize until he was halfway across the tent that he’d forgotten his cane, his bad hip immediately aching without the support, his leg dragging awkwardly at his step, his balance off. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.

“Bring him here,” Linhardt snapped, his voice unrecognizable, ragged and shaking in his mouth. The guard staggered over to the nearest cot, helped Hanneman onto it, and it was closer to falling than sitting down. 

Hanneman sobbed, clutching at his leg, and for a moment Linhardt stood—here, now, and there, then.

(A dark tent, cold, snow still on the ground from a late-spring frost, the smell of blood and iron and sweat in the air, the screams of the dead and dying in the air. On the wrong side of the battle lines, Linhardt separated from the Adrestian forces, caught up with the church, unnoticed for now. Manuela, halfway between hysterics and shock, Hanneman barely conscious on a bloodslick pallet. The snow around him is all red, his right leg laying beside him almost like it isn’t a part of his body any more.  His skin is grey, his pulse visible, fluttering in his temples and his neck. 

His breaths are so shallow and weak they barely make clouds in front of him.

There is white bone standing out in his thigh, at the top of his hip. Mud caked to his pants and his robe. He’s conscious, his teeth grit, his eyes wide and unseeing.

Linhardt smells bile and blood and worse.)

His hands shook for a moment, and he stilled them by force. Linhardt bit his lower lip until he tasted blood, shook away ten years ago. He pulled the tie from within his pocket, knotted his hair up into a tight bun, pushed his bangs out of his face.

This was no time for holding onto the past.

Linhardt undid the buttons of his coat, tossed it aside, and rolled his sleeves up. He hadn’t napped all day, despite his exhaustion, and it dogged at him now, dragged him down, dulled his senses.

“Bring me a basin of water and my tome,” Linhardt snapped at the first person who would listen to him, not taking his eyes from Hanneman. He knelt beside the cot, coaxed the other man to stick his leg out, and caught the curse that Hanneman hissed, wheezing between breaths.

Linhardt sliced the leg of his pants open from ankle almost to groin, and spat a curse of his own when he found the site of the injury.  The puncture wound had both entered and exited, and unfortunately, the offending weapon hadn’t been left in to staunch the blood. “Javelin,” Hanneman whispered, voice grating in his throat. He shook as Linhardt  washed his hands in the basin someone handed to him, t ook the cloth atop it and began to wipe away the blood. “It was an accident.”

Linhardt pretended he didn’t see the old scars that ringed the puncture wound, the ones that started at the top of Hanneman’s hip joint and then vanished beneath his smallclothes. The ones that he still remembered making, every stitch seared into his memory.

“Did they pull it out?” He asked, not looking up, cleaning away small splinters and blood. Hanneman nodded, jerky out of the corner of his vision. “It missed the bone,” Linhardt murmured, lips pursed. Focus. Focus on his hands. Focus on his motions. _Focus_.

( Shattered bone.  Screaming . Hoofprints. Bruises. Blood.)

Javelin wound. Wood. Linhardt had treated dozens, caught between chinks of armor. Usually, he picked them out himself after the shafts had been snapped, let them hold the blood in. They’d likely had to pull Hanneman free of it, if it had pinned him down.

Sweat beaded on Linhardt’s forehead, dripped down into his eyebrows, burned his eyes. He blinked it away. He wiped blood onto the pages of his tome as he turned between them, channeling magic through the ink. It buzzed against his hands, numbing tingles like cool water. Like always, it woke him right up, burned the doze of narcolepsy away. It left him exhausted,  the magic draining him of energy even as it sharpened his focus, as if he was using it to treat himself. Anything that could even vaguely be considered illness or pain was  fair game for healing magic; it magnified the body’s own latent healing. 

It woke Linhardt up, but he’d regret it later. He always did. Nights spent restless, afternoons spent passed out facedown on tables.

A hand, set on Linhardt’s shoulder, stilled him. He looked up and found Hanneman staring down at him, his eyes tired and his expression pinched, but he looked—steadier. “You can leave the rest,” he said, and Linhardt pressed his fingers over the wound just barely knit shut. “It will heal from here on its own.”

In the last ten years, Hanneman’s skin had grown thinner, more papery.  It was warm under Linhardt’s fingers. He tried not to shake, kneeling between Hanneman’s thighs, hands covered up to the elbows in the other man’s blood.

Linhardt rested his forehead, exhausted, against Hanneman’s other knee, his leg warm through the cloth of his pants. He stared, unseeing, at the dirt below, blood speckling it here and there. Just dirt. No snow.

His jaw felt tight, aching.

“Linhardt,” Hanneman said, softly. His fingers hesitated, and then settled, cool on the back of Linhardt’s neck. “I’m all right.” Linhardt trembled. He bit his lip again, shut his eyes. He opened his mouth to speak and then closed it when no words were forthcoming, just tried to breathe. Weathered his panic attacks the same way he had for ten years: as if nothing was wrong, because _someone_ had to act as if nothing was wrong. 

“That day,” he finally whispered, his voice dry. “In Faerghus.” He swallowed, tried to clear his throat. “Caspar died.” Hanneman said nothing. Waiting. “Because I wasn’t there.” He had come back and Edelgard had been forced to pull Linhardt off of Caspar’s body. He didn’t remember any of it, except for the freezing sleet and the way his throat felt raw and his chest felt empty, scooped-out. “If I had been with Edelgard, Caspar would have lived. But you would have died.”

Hanneman’s fingers pressed into his skin, gentler now. “I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I’m a poor replacement.” Linhardt shut his eyes tighter, as if by doing so he could stave off tears. As if he could keep himself from crying, his heart racing so fast the fingers of his left hand were numb, stop the panic that had frozen him, locked him to the ground kneeling where he was. “ Forgive me for being selfishly glad you saved my life.”

“There’s nothing to forgive,” Linhardt replied, half-sob half-whisper, and he felt Hanneman bow his head above him, pull him close, cradling him in a half-hug. “It was my fault.”

“No,” Hanneman told him, fingers carding through his hair. “No. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.” Linhardt shut his eyes tighter. Bit his lip again, tasted blood on the back of his tongue. “Not yours. Not Edelgard’s. Not mine. Not even Rhea’s.” Linhardt had begun to cry, clutching one-handed to Hanneman’s remaining trouser leg, doubled over and sobbing into the cloth. “I’m sorry,” Hanneman said again, softer, and it was easy to pretend there was nobody else there, because Linhardt wasn’t in a tent in Garreg Mach in 1196, he was bent over a straw pallet in Faerghus as snow fell, needle and thread in his hand while Manuela’s voice shredded in her throat, worn raw from singing magic until she collapsed; he was screaming and clawing red welts into Edelgard’s skin as she and Hubert held him back from trying to throw himself into the pyre with Caspar’s body, tears salty on his tongue, his chapped lips cracked and bleeding.

“I loved him,” Linhardt admitted it for the first time, fingers shaking as he held onto Hanneman’s knee, onto Hanneman’s hand, narrow, graceful fingers cool in his own. He sobbed. “I loved _you_.”

“I know,” Hanneman murmured, brushing the hair back from Linhardt’s face. His smile gentled his voice, kindness and affection mingled as one. “I know.”


End file.
